Wednesday, November 5

Libraries using social media

The Moonee Valley Library Service has a great Pinterest account - with boards dedicated to staff picks, genres and local history. I particularly like their 'local writers' board which lists a whole range of works by people who either lived in or written about the Moonee Valley area. They have also linked most of the titles back to the library catalogue, so if you see something you like you can instantly see if it is available at your local library. The sad thing is that Pinterest just isn't as popular as many other social media platforms - and as such the Moonee Valley Library only has around 150 followers at this point in time.

I love the SLV twitter feed. It is constantly being updated with not only library news but general Melbourne arts news. The quality of their tweets is also very high and they use a variety of picture, videos, links and text to keep their audience interested. For example they had a whole lots of tweets about Cup Day, some historical photos and some practical information (like when the library would be open). It is also great for keeping up-to-date with events, however I sometimes find that it's a little bit short notice and that sometimes events are fully booked just after the event has been advertised via twitter (although I guess this is just what they wanted).

The UoM Library does a great job of promoting some of its resources and helpful study information while also tapping in to some pop-culture references. They seem to suffer from a similar problem to the Moonee Valley Pinterest in that they don't have as many followers as they probably should. Only 11 000 out of the hundreds of thousands of past and present students. This is a shame as it is one of the better University social media accounts.